The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Distributed communication systems typically exhibit significant latency and performance degradation when clients access data resources that are located across a WAN in a remote LAN. In order to reduce the latency and improve performance, a distributed communication system may employ one or more proxy servers at the edges in each LAN at which that LAN is connected to the WAN. Such distributed communication system is referred to herein as a “multi-proxy communication system”.
In order to be able to establish optimized connections on behalf of their clients, proxy servers in a multi-proxy communication system need to be aware of each other as well as of the resource servers to which each proxy server provides optimized access. In one approach, a network administrator may manually configure each proxy server in a multi-proxy communication system with the necessary information. This approach works relatively well in small systems. However, manually configuring proxy servers in a large multi-proxy communication system, which may include dozens of proxy servers and hundreds or even thousands of resource servers, is cumbersome, tedious, and error-prone.